Søren Kierkegaard is a fascinating author. Living shortly after the dawn of modernity in the Enlightenment, he restates classical Christianity in dynamic fashion. His Lutheran heritage is vital here ...as he places ‘faith’ over ‘reason’. Yet Kierkegaard also holds decidedly pre-modern epistemological presuppositions that are supportive of his endeavour. After an initial chapter on Kierkegaard's intellectual milieu, the book expounds with reference to the philosophical and historical context of seven of his major texts, ranging across theological, ethical, social and political questions. A final chapter, on an autobiographical text, allows for an estimate of Kierkegaard as a person. The book does not however simply depict Kierkegaard. In the ‘Critique’ with which each chapter concludes, the book carries on a lively debate with Kierkegaard. Questions range from his indifference to biblical historical criticism, his lack of a sense for causality and for the regularity of nature, and his early a-political outlook. Whatever one's theological evaluation, Kierkegaard has insights that are abiding; into the nature of the self in relation to God, the manner of according dignity to others, and the need to prioritise rightly in life.
The book proposes a radically revised understanding of the epoch of the Danish Golden Age by investigating the historical and literary contexts of Søren Kierkegaard's pioneering thoughts on anxiety.
Saitya Brata Das argues that in Kierkegaard’s work we find a radical eschatological critique, not only of the liberal-humanist pathos of modernity but also the political theology of Carl Schmitt, ...that seeks to legitimise the sovereign power of the state by an appeal to a divine or theological foundation.
This volume is a study of the relationship between philosophy and faith in Søren Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments. It is also the first book to examine the role of Socrates in this body of ...writings, illuminating the significance of Socrates for Kierkegaard's thought. Jacob Howland argues that in the Fragments, philosophy and faith are closely related passions. A careful examination of the role of Socrates demonstrates that Socratic, philosophical eros opens up a path to faith. At the same time, the work of faith - which holds the self together with that which transcends it - is essentially erotic in the Socratic sense of the term. Chapters on Kierkegaard's Johannes Climacus and on Plato's Apology shed light on the Socratic character of the pseudonymous author of the Fragments and the role of 'the god' in Socrates' pursuit of wisdom. Howland also analyzes the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Kierkegaard's reflections on Socrates and Christ.
In many histories of modern ethics, Kant is supposed to have ushered in an anti-realist or constructivist turn by holding that unless we ourselves 'author' or lay down moral norms and values for ...ourselves, our autonomy as agents will be threatened. In this book, Robert Stern challenges the cogency of this 'argument from autonomy', and claims that Kant never subscribed to it. Rather, it is not value realism but the apparent obligatoriness of morality that really poses a challenge to our autonomy: how can this be accounted for without taking away our freedom? The debate the book focuses on therefore concerns whether this obligatoriness should be located in ourselves (Kant), in others (Hegel) or in God (Kierkegaard). Stern traces the historical dialectic that drove the development of these respective theories, and clearly and sympathetically considers their merits and disadvantages; he concludes by arguing that the choice between them remains open.
Kierkegaard’s psychological thought has always been acknowledged as very rich—Reinhold Niebuhr hailed him as the greatest psychologist of the soul since Augustine—and has had a major influence on ...Heidegger, Sartre, and existential psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, his accomplishment has not always been fully appreciated, in part because it is so scattered across his works. As Vincent McCarthy demonstrates in Kierkegaard as Psychologist, Kierkegaard was pursuing “psychology” before there was a formally recognized academic field bearing that name, and a coherent thread runs through the so-called pseudonymous works. McCarthy elucidates often-difficult texts, highlights the rich psychological dimension of Kierkegaard’s thought, and provides an introduction for the nonspecialist and a commentary on Kierkegaard’s psychology that will interest both specialists and nonspecialists, while engaging in rich comparisons with such figures as Freud and Heidegger.
Kierkegaard's writings are interspersed with remarkable stories of love, commonly understood as a literary device that illustrates the problematic nature of aesthetic and ethical forms of life, and ...the contrasting desirability of the life of faith. Sharon Krishek argues that for Kierkegaard the connection between love and faith is far from being merely illustrative. Rather, love and faith have a common structure, and are involved with one another in a way that makes it impossible to love well without faith. Remarkably, this applies to romantic love no less than to neighbourly love. Krishek's original and compelling interpretation of the Works of Love in the light of Kierkegaard's famous analysis of the paradoxicality of faith in Fear and Trembling shows that preferential love, and in particular romantic love, plays a much more important and positive role in his thinking than has usually been assumed.
Simon D. Podmore claims that becoming a self before God is both a divine
gift and an anxious obligation. Before we can know God, or ourselves, we must come
to a moment of recognition. How this comes ...to be, as well as the terms of such
acknowledgment, are worked out in Podmore's powerful new reading of Kierkegaard. As
he gives full consideration to Kierkegaard's writings, Podmore explores themes such
as despair, anxiety, melancholy, and spiritual trial, and how they are broken by the
triumph of faith, forgiveness, and the love of God. He confronts the abyss between
the self and the divine in order to understand how we can come to know ourselves in
relation to a God who is apparently so wholly Other.
In this study John W. Elrod demonstrates that Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings have an ontological foundation that unites the disparate elements of these books. The descriptions of the different ...stages of human development are not fully understandable, the author argues, without an awareness of the role played by this ontology in Kierkegaard's analysis of human existence.
Kierkegaard contends that the self is a synthesis of finitude and infinitude, body and soul, reality and ideality, necessity and possibility, and time and eternity. Each of these syntheses reveals a particular and unique aspect of individual being not disclosed in the others. Part One shows that ontology is central to the discussion of the self in the pseudonyms. The author notes that spirit, as a synthesis of the expressions of the self, develops as consciousness and freedom. In Part Two he indicates the relationship between notions of being and existence. He notes that existence, in Kierkegaard's thought, grows out of the life of the spirit; the different stages of existence are concrete modes that develop in the spirit's striving to unify the self as a synthesis. These existential expressions of spirit are dialectically related, in that each step requires the preceding stages of spiritual development.
Originally published in 1975.
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